This invention relates to an imaging system including a printer or copier, for example, for use with a computer and, more particularly, to an arrangement for controlling the destination of each printed sheet in accordance with the type of media on which printing occurs.
Imaging systems include a printer or copier, for example, for producing an image on a sheet of media. Printers such as laser printers and ink jet printers, for example, used with a computer usually have a plurality of media input sources from which a selected sheet of media may be fed to the printer. These various sources may have different sizes and types of the media.
In the copending patent application Ser. No. 09/266,964, now abandoned, of Kathy S. D""Alessandro et al for xe2x80x9cAdjustable Mail Box Capacity For Network Printer Assistance,xe2x80x9d filed Mar. 12, 1999, and assigned to the same assignee as the assignee of this application, each of the physical output bins of the printer is utilized with specific address. Two or more output bins may be linked to each other to form a single address, if desired.
In the aforesaid D""Alessandro et al application, the user at a computer selects a specific address. This results in a printer driver in the computer selecting the output bin of the printer to which the printed sheets of media are supplied by the printer.
In the aforesaid D""Alessandro et al application, some of the output bins are logically linked to each other under a single address. For example, each output bin could receive all of the sheets of media, irrespective of the types of media, for a specific individual.
When a computer is used in an environment in which different types of media are needed, it is desired to be able to select each of the output bins in accordance with the type of media upon which printing is to occur. For example, in a pharmacy, it would be desirable to print a label, a bill, and instructions for each prescription. These three different types of media could not be easily deposited in three separate output bins in the aforesaid D""Alessandro et al application.
The present invention satisfactorily solves the foregoing problem by having the software of the printer include a programmable electronic data processor programmed to direct printed sheets of media to various output bins of the printer in accordance with the type of media on which printing occurs. This is accomplished through selecting an output bin of a printer for each type of media. It should be understood that more than one type of media may be received in the same output bin, if desired, but each type of media is limited to one output bin in which the one output bin is deemed to include a logically linked set of output bins.
The printing system of the present invention relies solely on the type of media selected and a non-volatile memory storing the name of each type of media and the output bin to which printed sheets of the specific type of media are supplied. Accordingly, the present invention ignores any output bin selected for a specific print job by a printer driver in the computer controlling the printer. Instead, the present invention relies solely upon the type of media selected by a user or a formatting interpreter to determine the output bin to which each printed sheet of the selected type of media is directed by the printer. The selection of the type of media may be made in a word processing program such as WORD sold by Microsoft, for example.
An object of this invention is to use the type of media on which printing occurs to improve output media handling.
Another object of this invention is to control the output destination for printed sheets of media in accordance with the type of media being printed.